Return of the SMS: The Freshdesk-FireText integration

This is a guest post by Holly Barber, Marketing Manager, FireText.

Great customer support comes down to one thing and one thing only: how you communicate with your customers. The sooner you find out about the issue, the sooner their issue gets solved. And the sooner they receive the solution, the happier they are. One of the easiest ways to make a lasting impact on your customers is to over-deliver on your resolution times.

Unfortunately, in the real world, this doesn’t happen as easily.

Every day, a lot of time gets lost between you getting notified about a new ticket and customers getting notified about responses to those tickets. For those of us who are not hyper-connected, most of this is mistakenly spent waiting for a response that is already in your inbox. Even if your turnaround time is less than 30 minutes, your customers are left feeling abandoned for a large chunk of your interaction, just because they did not check their email. So, by the time they get around to your reply, instead of being blown away by your super-fast response times, they are left to feel just satisfied.

That is kind of sad, because when this happens, a lot of hard work, good will and trust just gets lost in nothingness. If only, there was an integration that would allow you to bridge this gap by notifying you about new support tickets, and allowing you to respond to them via SMS, right from your Freshdesk account…

If there existed such an integration, there would be a lot of advantages to it.

1. Communication would be near-instantaneous

When a customer submits a ticket that requires urgent attention, it hardly seems fair to make them wait for your email response to find out what happened. Boost customer satisfaction by delivering status updates right to their pocket. And seeing as 94% of SMS messages are read within 5 minutes of being received, you’ll not only be solving tickets faster but you’ll also be offering your customer an additional method of communication.

2. Interactions would be accessible any time, any place, no matter what the device

You have to struggle to find someone who isn’t within arm’s reach of their mobile phone at all times these days; another reason why it’s the perfect way to reach someone easily and instantaneously. Customers can read and reply to SMS at a time and place convenient for them – it’s quick, easy and can be managed on the go. The best part is, unlike every other communication channel, they don’t need the Internet to keep up with you.

3. Exchanges would be more personal

As far as customer engagement strategies go, text messages are about as personal as they get. Messages are delivered right to the customer’s pocket, personalized messages that let them know how much you care about solving their problem. If that doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what will.

It’s also one of the least intrusive communication channels, so the entire support experience is much smoother for the customer.

So how would it work?

All you have to do is set up a FireText account and let us know that you’d like us to enable the integration. Once you do, all the messages from your FireText account will be forwarded to your helpdesk. And voila! Customers can now just simply text in their question which automatically gets converted into a support ticket. You reply, just like you usually would, from your Freshdesk dashboard and it’s pinged back out to the customer by text! Two-way conversation can then continue on in this manner until the ticket is resolved. Simple.

Wondering how to go about setting up this integration? This post has you covered.